The end of the IT department

He's completely wrong about the one pretty important detail: why businesses are fed up with their IT departments. The reason isn't because of IT's unwillingness to adopt new technology (his Exchange-to-Gmail example), or that there isn't any "feedback loop for improvement." IT departments were created and exist because external vendors haven't satisfied business needs adequately. In small to medium sized businesses that's changing rapidly, but in large enterprises it's a glacial shift specifically due to what David doesn't get: IT is slow because businesses don't know what they want, they create overly complex specifications, they are slow to make decisions, and they often enforce draconian regulations. There are an abundance of ways IT can perform better in the age of web, not the least of which is knowing when to strategically outsource NVA functions. Sometimes these are obvious, like email, but a number of other core SG&A-type systems can be moved off-premise, too: HRIS, project management, helpdesk, and many more (there are even SAAS ERPs popping up).

As AngeloAnolin notes, this is forcing every IT staffer -- especially managers -- to be as close to the business as only CIOs have been.

Since I am not at liberty to discuss what I've been doing for the last two weeks and why that makes this assertion completely, utterly and shamefully naive (and ridiculous), I'm just going to tell you a story.

Years ago, my mother worked for a company that did installations and technical support for PoS appliances. She was employee number four. This company figured that since it was chock full of highly technical people, they had no real need for an established IT department or any sort of formal policy for servers or services on site.

Guess what the password to their payroll server was?

Despite having grown from a small start-up to a respectably financially successful company in less than a decade (note: BEFORE the dot.com bubble, mind you), once their staff of technical people found out that some techs were being paid more than others... well, you can imagine what happened. My mother was one of the last people out the door.

Every time I read or hear someone shrug off the importance of IT, complain about policies or refer to IT staff as a 'cost center', I am reminded of how 'mainstream' staff still have a lot of trouble wrapping their minds around how much trouble one badly behaved employee can cause. Even when there is an established IT department, it usually suffers from such a paucity of resources and effective management that the enterprise network... well, the word 'bloodbath' comes to mind.

And now I'm going to start a stopwatch to see how much time elapses before tptacek makes me delete this comment. :-)

I'm not a big fan of prohibitive IT departments, but this article is probably as biased as you'd expect an article from a major SaaS provider to be.

I witnessed the shift from a very restrictive environment (central SVN accessible only through VPN, all authenticated through Active Directory, limited access to servers) towards "the cloud" (Google Docs, Github, AWS, etc) at my last employer. While the latter has it's advantages, but it's not all rainbows and unicorns.

One major issue is user management. I quit yesterday (self employed now, yeah), who ensures that my accounts gets deactivated on all these services? With a centralized approach, it's just one click.

I will agree that there are a lot of legacy IT departments that need a serious shakeup, but...

Sure, nobody has complex needs that can't be satisfied by a bunch of web apps, and everyone already knows exactly the hardware they're going to need to properly do a job.

Additionally, everyone online offering said web apps is totally competent, never has data loss, is alway available, and meets the exact needs of every customer.

There's a huge market for bespoke solutions, and people who understand technology and guide customers into good decisions. This is what sysadmins and other competent "full-stack" people are for. Don't use them at your own peril.

A sensational title with illogical predictions based upon no data.

Like lawyers, insurance agents, and government officials, everyone bitches and moans about IT...until they need them.

Does OP honestly believe that small business people can maintain their own servers? Remember, these are mostly people who believe that theBrowser = theInternet, all you have to do is "plug and play", and when in doubt, reboot.

Does OP really believe that small business people can rely on "local expertise from a web site somewhere" to insure mission critical up time, maintenance, and fiduciary compliance. Not anywhere I've ever been.

I get it that 37signals is cool and has built a really nice silo within which to operate. But please stop with the posts about the other 99% of the world you know nothing about.

Clearly the conventional notion of an IT department will transition over time as major shifts in technology occur. However, the shift requires technology to be embedded within the business processes as both a profit enhancer and an efficiency driver. A company that outsources all of it's technology expertise would find it hard to compete in the long term.

It's "The End of History" all over again. It would seem that this post merely demonstrated the necessity of the IT department managing resources.

(There are some good comments on that page, so I won't bother to repeat what they said.)

Huh?? Don't they have big-iron machines as their database servers?

Who's replacing RAID controllers on those beasts?

IT department says you can only use software approved by them, for your own good. boo hiss "IT is a doomed industry!"

Apple says you can only use software approved by them, for your own good applause "New era of curated computing!"

Unless your IT department is the core of the business, this just gives one more reason why people in IT should learn their core businesses.